Within the context of traditional corporate travel reservations, travelers tend to ask for availability of flights and options on a point by point basis. That is, rather than specifying every leg of an entire trip to a travel counselor up front, a corporate traveler tends to investigate and discuss options one leg at a time. Within legacy GDS functionality (green screen mode), travel counselors have very granular and flexible functionality at their disposal to search available flights for a specific leg of a trip. They can select or sell several options for that particular leg and then move on to the next leg working in a linear fashion. Having potentially selected or sold several options for each leg, the travel counselor can then manipulate fare quotes and pricing by selecting specific flight legs in various combinations to achieve the most desirable itinerary and fare combination.
By comparison, the more robust low fare functionality found in the rich Graphical User Interface (GUI) applications on the Internet have generally been adopted in consumer user products.
Adoption of the new agent GUIs by corporate travel counselors has been low because these GUIs do not address or support the traditional corporate traveler call flow and mode of working as described above. Instead, the air search and pricing functionality of existing agent GUIs mainly mimic that of a consumer facing online travel agency (OLTA) or corporate online booking tool (OBT) where many itinerary and fare solutions are presented to an agent, but each solution is a bundle of pre-assembled flights representing the entire trip. While these applications offer the power of low fare search results and fare and compare functionality, they lack the flexibility and granularity of the legacy GDS to react and adjust to the questions, requests and needs of a corporate traveler. Agents are restricted to selecting a pre-assembled bundle of flight options, and have no opportunity to break the bundle to combine specific leg options to research and assemble the most desirable trip option for a corporate traveler. Even in the case where scheduled-based availability is displayed in existing graphical tools, they do not provide the granularity of information, nor the flexibility in relation to selecting and combining data that is required to address the needs of the corporate traveler.
This is not a new problem, but one for which a solution is sought.
WO0215064 discloses an interactive booking method and system in which flexible selection of legs can be carried out to modify an itinerary.
US20080109156 describes a three dimensional matrix selecting travel criteria and within a GUI.
US20040078252 discloses an interface for travel bookings based on a flexible date query.
WO2007110352 discloses an interface for a travel reservations system which is orientated towards the display of initial fare information.
Whilst the prior art documents offer some solutions to improving travel bookings, they do not present an adequate solution to all the problems associated with travel bookings and do not provide the flexibility required by corporate travel agents.